Features

Thursday

William Atkinson

My teenage brush with a micropenis

Like Adolf Hitler, I have been involved in a Channel 4 documentary about penises. I also share a love for watercolours and a partiality for Wagner but that, I promise, is where the similarities end. But back to penises. The Führer’s genitalia – or lack thereof – is a feature of a new documentary, Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator. The documentary makers have examined a scrap of the bloodied fabric from the bunker sofa upon which Hitler blew his brains out and the long – but mostly the short – of the findings are that history’s most evil man likely had underdeveloped sexual organs, including a micropenis and an undescended testicle.

Michael Simmons

The greatest threat to the economy? The Employment Rights Bill

On Monday night, former England manager Gareth Southgate joined MPs and philanthropists for an event in Westminster described as ‘the Oscars of the charity world’. Cabinet ministers Lisa Nandy and Bridget Phillipson joined the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) in handing out prizes to five charities that help those who fall through the cracks. Across the winners, a single theme stood out: the transformative power of a good job. But Britain is running out of those jobs. Vacancies are falling, unemployment has risen to 5 per cent, while a deeper crisis sits beneath both: nine million working age people are economically inactive, including more than four million on out-of-work benefits with ‘no work requirement’.

Richard Dearlove

Britain’s national security must not be sacrificed to net zero

Those who, like myself, experienced life behind the Iron Curtain understand instinctively that centrally planned economies beholden to an ideology do not bring benefit to the majority of the population on whom they are imposed. A few top-level individuals prosper, but the citizen finds himself and his aspirations crushed by the diktats of central government. The state itself is similarly confined by a set of ideas which are presented as self-evident truths which constrain its policy--making and exclude challenge. That Iron Curtain model describes pretty accurately the UK’s energy policy, driven as it is by the ideological pursuit of net zero and the diktats required to implement it.

Tim Shipman

It’s time to dispose of the Budget

Denis Healey’s ‘caretaker Budget’ on 3 April 1979 is an odd focus for Labour nostalgia. It came a week after Jim Callaghan’s government had lost a vote of no confidence, paving the way for Margaret Thatcher’s arrival in No. 10. Healey was reduced to merely introducing the finance bill to maintain normal tax collection functions, and made no other announcements at all. But as chaos surrounds Rachel Reeves’s second Budget next week, one senior figure fondly recalled that simpler time. Healey began his 27-minute ‘non-Budget’ (as Geoffrey Howe called it) speech by confessing: ‘I feel a little bit like a man who turns up to play the leading role in the opera and all they want him to do is to help them hold the scenery together.

Thursday

John Power

Britain’s cities are descending into a San Francisco-style nightmare

One morning a few months ago I was walking past St James’s Park station when a dishevelled man with his fists clenched stepped into my path without warning. He stared at me furiously and blocked my path, body almost shaking. For a few tense seconds he stood there before I crossed the road to get away from him. ‘Most rough sleepers are harmless and vulnerable, but a small minority are violent’ When I told friends who work in central London about this incident, I was shocked at how typical my experience was. For people who commute into Westminster, it is becoming commonplace to be spat at, lunged at and screamed at to ‘fuck off’ by individuals who appear to be high on illegal drugs.

Rosie Lewis

How to get Britain eating healthily again

Another week, another government offensive against childhood obesity. This time it’s a fresh round of pleas for new levies on junk food. And right on cue, out come the sympathetic pundits with a familiar lament: the poor simply can’t afford to eat well. Carrots are unaffordable and broccoli is a luxury that only the middle class can stretch to. It’s a predictable narrative. It’s also wrong, or at least, far from the whole truth. I say this having lived the messy reality of fostering, where I’ve had the privilege, and sometimes pain, of stepping into lives different from my own. For more than 20 years, I’ve cared for children pulled from homes where parenting skills are scarce and where ‘dinner’ might consist of a handful of sweets and a packet of crisps.

Matt Ridley

America thinks Britain is finished

‘What’s missing?’ the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at the city of Los Angeles laid out in the haze below us. ‘Cranes!’ he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital ‘bits’ instead of physical ‘atoms’, because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing.

Allan Mallinson

The army is too woke for war

Last month, in a two-page letter to colonels of corps and regiments, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant-General David Eastman, inadvertently exposed the moral confusion, panic even, possessing parts of the British Army. Invited to dine by retired and serving officer members of the private London club Boodle’s, Eastman was dismayed to discover that there were ‘restrictions on the rooms that can be accessed’ by women. In his subsequent letter, he expresses concern that, even in mixed clubs, ‘rules, policies or cultural practices may not align with the army’s commitment to inclusivity’.

Justin Marozzi

What Andrew’s Norfolk exile will look like

When Russian dissidents were bundled off into exile under the tsars, they were sent to Siberia, the ‘prison without a roof’, and disappeared from society, never to be seen again. Many residents of Norfolk, where the King has exiled his brother, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, will be hoping he follows the same route. ‘There may be a certain thrill about having him, like presenting Liz Truss in your sitting room’ Norfolk likes to call itself a ‘royal county’, as the Visit Norfolk website proudly proclaims. Sandringham, the family’s private home, is well known. But the royal connection pre-dates Queen Victoria’s purchase of the country retreat for her son Albert in 1862 by almost 800 years.

Rod Liddle

How to fix the BBC

Assuming the BBC is still in existence by the time you read this, the scale of the task facing the next director-general would have been evident by listening to the output on Monday, the day after Tim Davie and Deborah Turness resigned. This was an organisation in utter denial. It began with Nick Robinson, puffed up with even more pompous self-regard than normal, treating Today listeners to a psychedelic monologue in which he disappeared down several capacious rabbit holes, jabbering about a sort of palace coup at the BBC, an assault by sinister right-wing forces.

Lara Brown

Revealed: the bias of the BBC News app

The most influential person in British media is not Rupert Murdoch or Lord Rothermere – it’s the editor who pushes out the BBC News app alerts. While many people gave up watching BBC News years ago, the corporation still dominates how millions receive their news, thanks to the app. Last year, it overtook Apple News to become Britain’s most-visited news app. Whoever controls those push notifications has the power to make the phones of the app’s 14.2 million users buzz with notifications several times a day, providing a constant stream of news updates and reaching a far larger audience than that of any television news bulletin, newspaper or magazine. Stories that flatter progressive orthodoxies are amplified; those that challenge them are sidelined So how is this power used?

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The rise of the on-the-day party drop-out

A new drinks-party-shirking method has taken hold in British society. I call it ‘Lastminute.non’. Previously, the way of not going to someone’s party was to write a polite message of refusal at least a week in advance, giving the host or hostess ample time to absorb the sad but inevitable fact that various friends would not be able to attend – usually for copper-bottomed reasons, such as that they had other plans for the evening or would be away on holiday. The new trend seems to be to accept an invitation, and then, mere hours before, to duck out of it. This means that from breakfast time onwards throughout the day of the party, the host will receive a steady stream of apologetic messages.

Thursday

Rebecca Reid

Confessions of a reformed polyamorist

There is an adage, attributed to author Robert Heinlein, that every generation thinks it invented sex. This often means finding a ‘new’ way to conduct relationships. For my generation, the millennials, this came in the guise of polyamory. Sometimes known as an open relationship or ethnical non-monogamy, polyamory is the practice of dating and having sex with people other than your partner. It became fashionable in the 2010s and is now more popular than ever. Of course, open relationships have existed forever, and I’m sure the French would be furious at any suggestion that extramarital sex was invented by my lot.

Margaret Mitchell

Save England’s apples!

On a grey autumn morning, the apples in the National Fruit Collection look vivid. They pile up in pyramids of carmine, salmon and golden-orange around dwarf trees, which have been bred to human proportions. Their branches are well within reach but picking fruit is forbidden. These trees are part of the world’s largest fruit gene bank. Neil Franklin, an agronomist and a trustee of the National Fruit Collection in Kent, describes it as ‘the Victoria and Albert Museum of the fruit industry’. The collection holds several types of fruit, but the apple is queen of them all: of the 4,000 or so fruit varieties here, more than 2,200 are apples. They’re used mainly for research into breeding and resistance to pests and diseases.

Ian Williams

China is holding the West to ransom over rare earths

China’s naked weaponisation of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s ‘four pests’ campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm. Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisers reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to crops than the sparrows ever did, hastening China’s descent into the deadliest famine in human history.

John Power

Why are psychiatrists scared of sectioning dangerous patients?

The police initially treated last weekend’s stabbings on a train near Huntingdon as a possible terror attack, before confirming it wasn’t. Since then, it has been widely reported that the suspect, Anthony Williams, told one of his victims that ‘the devil’s not going to win’ as she pleaded with him not to stab her. So instead of terrorism, the outlines of another familiar British tragedy have begun to take shape: a violent outburst by a man apparently in the grip of severe mental illness. Why would someone with severe mental illness be able to roam in public? It is partly because of underfunded public services. The number of mental health beds in the NHS decreased by a quarter between 2010 and last year.

Harriet Sergeant

The inconvenient truth about cannabis and mental illness

Mash’s older brother was the same age as Anthony Williams when he slaughtered a stranger in a brutal and random attack. He was in the grip of a psychotic disorder caused by cannabis. We do not yet know what drove Williams, a 32-year-old African Caribbean man, to allegedly try to murder ten people during a 14-minute knife rampage on a train. But Mash is in no doubt cannabis often plays a part in attacks like these. ‘In my community smoking weed is normalised,’ he says. ‘We laugh and joke about hearing voices or having a “para” [a paranoid fit].’ He counts on his fingers: ‘Two brothers, two cousins and multiple friends’ who have experienced hallucinations and delusions. He shakes his head sadly. ‘Weed is killing my people.

Andrew Gimson

Is Zack Polanski our Zohran Mamdani?

Like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Zack Polanski offers the thrill of cost-free rebellion. Mamdani leapt to prominence at the end of June by unexpectedly winning the Democratic party nomination in the New York mayoral race, and doing so as an avowed socialist who claims that by taxing the rich he will relieve ‘the despair in working-class Americans’ lives’. Polanski has made waves since the start of September as the new leader of the Green party of England and Wales, using a rhetoric calculated to appeal to left-wing activists, while proclaiming himself the champion of plumbers and hairdressers. He has conjured up an alliance between utopian socialists like himself and sturdy, hard-working people who provide services on which we all depend, and who are struggling to get by.

Tim Shipman

Gilded age: the lessons from Trump’s second term

Washington, D.C. When John Swinney, the SNP leader, and Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. ‘If you’re going to do it,’ Scotland’s First Minister suggested, ‘you might as well go big.’ This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term.

Thursday

Michael Simmons

Datageddon: Britain’s stats have become dangerously unreliable

There were cheers in the Treasury last month as the nation’s statisticians discovered a spare £3 billion down the back of the sofa. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) admitted that VAT receipts had been under-reported by £1 billion last year and £2 billion this year. The newly found cash will go some way to filling the Chancellor’s £30 billion fiscal black hole, but not everyone was celebrating. Just 150 miles west along the M4, at the home of the ONS in Newport, Wales, the mood was grim. The embattled agency was splashed across the papers for the wrong reasons. This error was just the latest in a long line of data disasters. That’s because the quality of Britain’s official data, like much of British life, has deteriorated to the point of being dangerously unreliable.